Government Technology reports on New York's progress implementing its 2006 strategic plan. Part of the progress includes a new, fully funded data center. The article also provides some added information on the planned statewide public safety wireless network and VoIP telephony.

He isn't your average information architect. Peter Morville, author of the book "Ambient Findability," recently fielded questions online about the future of information and connectivity (Washington Post, free registration required). Morville touches on the issues of information authority, body hacks and interface design. This information technologist is most definitely focused on nature of information - what it is, where it is and how we interact with it.

Public CIO has more information on the most recent NASCIO Washington fly-in, touching on the announced reason for the trip, the need to coordinate federal IT outlays in state government with state CIOs:

The CIOs also met with members of non-governmental organizations such as the
National [Governors] Association and the eHeatlh Initiative. While three-quarters
of a state CIO's work involves implementing federal funds, [Wisconsin CIO Matt] Miszewski says, too
often the allocation and dispersal of federal money for state IT projects occurs
without the involvement of the CIO.

Currently, the general guidelines attached to federal programmatic funding do not promote enterprise IT shared solutions, infrastructure optimization or the integrated channels of services sought by citizens. The state IT landscape has changed significantly, yet federal grant funding guidelines do not reflect this new environment. As millions of new federal dollars are spent on IT that supports human services, public health, justice and homeland security, a change in attitude toward enterprise IT solutions and flexible commingling guidelines with specific cost-allocation options could greatly improve the return on every federal dollar spent on information systems in the states.

According to Doug Robinson, executive director for NASCIO, "A total of 36 separate meetings were held. Of those, 30 were with Members of Congress or their staffs, 4 were with
federal agencies..."

The organization also recently published this brief on the position of chief information security officer (CISO) and will likely follow up with a survey.

Peter Quinn may have left his position as the CIO for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but the cause for which he may be most remembered lives on. CIO since January, Louis Gutierrez, according to Government Technology's Public CIO, is backing the OpenDocument push too.

'Our action is to do what we are doing right now, which is working
toward the goal. We believe in the utility of open standards,'
Gutierrez told News.com. His stance comes in spite of a report that
heavily criticized the process behind the decision by the Information
Technology Division (ITD) to standardize the state government on the
OpenDocument format by January 2007.

Microsoft's Office application will not support OpenDocument in its 2007 release. IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems, however, back the competing OpenDocument standard.

But rather than remove MS Office from the commonwealth's computers, ITD is looking at an Office plug-in that would permit employees to save and circulate documents in the OpenDocument format, according to Newcombe's blog post "Open Mass."

While the issue may be in flux, there is one development could tip the scales back toward the status quo. A new governor will be elected in November.

I keep writing about WiFi phones while wondering when they'll move beyond mere curiosities. This Om Malik post, which displays a new clam shell WiFi phone from D-Link, also introduced me to a new term, "PsipTN," that may hold part of the answer.

PsipTN stands for "Public SIP Telephone
Network," a "global IP
network capable of carrying voice, media,
contents and a variety of hosted services
while providing interoperability with all PsipTN
Ready hardware IP end points and soft
clients." The network is maintained by contributing members of PsipTN.org.

It's part of the emerging fixed-mobile environment. British Telecom launched a related service in June, BT Fusion.

NASTD members may download a recent presentation at the Western region meeting on the subject of fixed-mobile convergence here.

Over at Om Malik's blog, Katie Fehrenbacher writes than in addition to developing muni-broadband networks, Earthlink is planning a WiFi-only phone. The company plans to sell voice and data subscriptions.